Scholarly Disciplines
Economic History
Humanities
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Origin from 1926
The archival and statistical study of how economies actually functioned, given its first dedicated society in England in 1926. Documents the landholding, moneylending and endowment activity of religious institutions across history.
Facts
Method
Methodquantitative and archival analysis of prices, trade, production and institutions to reconstruct how economies actually functioned in the past, tested against documentary and statistical record rather than economic theory alone 2 Subject
Subjectthe material and institutional history of production, trade, labor and religious economic practice, including how religious institutions have owned property, financed activity and regulated commerce 2 Identity
Field Category Parent Field Origins
Emerged As Named Discipline Learn More
The Economic History Society Gives the Field Its Own Learned Society
Economic history studies how economies actually functioned in the past, prices, trade routes, production, labor and the institutions that organized them, testing general economic theory against archival and statistical evidence rather than assuming it. The discipline gained its first dedicated professional body in England in 1926, when a group of historians and economists founded the Economic History Society, which began publishing the Economic History Review the following year and gave scholars working across both economics and history departments a shared professional home distinct from either parent field.
Religious institutions have been major economic actors throughout documented history, medieval monasteries as landowners and moneylenders, temple estates as centers of agricultural production, waqf endowments financing mosques and schools, and tithing systems funding churches, and economic history supplies the documentary and statistical record needed to describe those roles accurately rather than through a tradition's own idealized account of its finances. The atlas draws on the discipline wherever a religious institution's wealth, landholding or commercial activity is part of its documented history, treating the economic record as evidence distinct from doctrinal self presentation.
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